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Beard was a good friend of the composer William Boyce (1711-1779), whose serenata Solomon was completed in March 1742 and probably first performed later that year by the Apollo Academy, directed by Maurice Greene. Unlike Handel’s later oratorio of the same name, Edward Moore’s libretto is an essentially secular poetic sequence about erotic love drawn from the Song of Solomon; it does not present any dramatic narrative or feature character development—instead the lyrical poetry of the source is absorbed into a sequence of sensual exchanges between the two soloists, who are called merely ‘He’ and ‘She’. It is unknown if Beard took part in the serenata’s first performance, but he certainly sang in at least three subsequent revivals of the work.